The tried-and-true Adobe Photoshop makes it easy to whiten teeth in just a few steps. Teeth whitening can help your subjects look their best, which can potentially translate to more work for you. In this particular Photoshop tutorial, we’ll walk you through the process, step by step.
How to Whiten Teeth in Photoshop, a Step-by-Step Tutorial
1. Select and open your image in Adobe Photoshop
Under the File menu, select Open and choose your image. Click Open.
2. Prepare your image file for teeth whitening
Take a look at your image. If there’s just one subject in the photograph, you’ll only need to perform the whitening process once. If there are more subjects, you’ll need to do it multiple times. Perform each of these steps separately for each subject. That way you can make adjustments to one subject’s teeth without affecting the other in your original image.
Zoom in on the first person’s teeth by pressing CTRL (for Windows) or CMD (for Mac) on your keyboard and the + sign, until you can see the full smile.
3. Draw a selection around the teeth using the Lasso Tool
Select the Lasso Tool in the Toolbar panel. Draw a selection around the teeth. If you are using a mouse, your selection may not be perfectly precise. Don’t worry, though; you’ll have a chance to adjust it later on.
4. Create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer
In the Layers panel, click the New Fill or Adjustment Layer button. This will bring up a drop-down menu of Adjustment Layer options. Select Hue/Saturation.
You should now see a new Hue/Saturation layer above your Background layer in the Layers panel. If you only have one set of teeth to whiten, you can leave this layer name alone. If you have multiple sets of teeth to whiten, rename the layer. Renaming will let you easily identify which set of teeth the layer relates to.
5. Adjust the layer options to Yellows
For tooth whitening, we’ll focus on reducing the yellow teeth in question. In the Hue/Saturation layer’s Properties Panel, click where it says Master to bring up a drop-down menu.
Select Yellows from the drop down. Now any changes we make on this adjustment layer will only affect the yellows in the selection.
6. Pull down the yellow saturation
Drag the saturation slider toward the left. Don’t go all the way to the left or your image edits will look fake. Focus on gently reducing how yellow the teeth are.
7. Check your work
As you make changes, zoom back out to see how the image looks from farther away. With the image zoomed out, click the eye icon next to the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in the Layers panel. Clicking the eye icon turns your yellow adjustments on and off.
If your edits feel too obvious, go back in and make any necessary adjustments.
8. Brighten the teeth
Now that you’re happy with the yellow adjustments, click “Yellow” in the Properties panel. Select Master. Now your adjustments will affect all colors in the selection.
Drag the Lightness slider to the right to add brightness to the teeth. Just like before, you can zoom in and out, or turn the adjustment layer on and off to check your work.
9. Clean up the selection area
If you didn’t cleanly select all the teeth, or you accidentally selected the lips or gums, now is the time to make your selection more precise.
Look at the Layer Mask thumbnail for your Hue/Saturation layer in the Layers panel. The thumbnail will be filled in with the document’s foreground color (in this case black). The areas we’ve selected and adjusted will be visible in white (the document’s background color).
Here’s how to quickly tweak the selection:
- Select the Brush Tool in the Tool panel.
- To paint out areas that shouldn’t be whitened (lips, gums, etc.), select the foreground color (black) as your paint color. Paint those areas to remove them from the selection.
- To paint in areas you missed in your initial selection (parts of the teeth that you may have missed), select the background color (white) as your paint color. Paint those areas to add them to the selection.
10. Whiten teeth for additional subject and finish up
If there are more people in your image, go back to step 3 and start the process again for each remaining person. Remember that you never want the teeth to look like they’re the most obvious part of the face.
